Biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book prophesying that human apocalypse was at hand bombed in all its predictions. Still, it left behind political and cultural craters that bedevil us still.

Ehrlich died rich this month, passing away at the ripe old age of 93, a one-man ironic riposte to his own misbegotten claims. He was, after all, a generational voice crying in the salons of the well fed and overeducated that overpopulation doomed us all to impoverishment, starvation, and lives of irreversible environmental squalor. One headline over an obituary column framed his contribution to humanity this way: “Always Wrong, Never in Doubt.” 

An infamous paragraph from his dunderheaded The Population Bomb waved the white flag even in the late 1960s over trying to avert famine: “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

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Reality got the last laugh. World population increased by 400 per cent during the 20th century. Humanity’s crop harvest increased 600 per cent. In 1980, an economist made a bet with Ehrlich over whether five key commodity prices would rise or fall during the coming decade. Rising prices would signal shortages caused by overconsumption. Falling prices would show human ingenuity triumphant again. Mr. Upscale Apocalypse paid the price in 1990 for his foolish wager.

The rest of us have paid a far greater price in lives lost not to famine or dystopian overcrowding of the planet but to the wicked ideology for which Ehrlich was both figurehead and braying voice. His unconscionably erroneous book taught generations a deep-seated hatred of humanity itself. So did the celebrity that inexplicably attached to him even after his predictions were proven farcical. People, by this rationale, are always the problem, never the creative solution.

Such thinking is a primary source of what Saint John Paul II called “the culture of death” that permeates our politics, our artistic industries, our academies, our media, and even those swathes of the environmental movement that consider all human creation as corruption. Ehrlich was not the sole source of that cultural catastrophe, of course, but he was an ambitious amplifier and, yet another irony, exploiter of it.

An effect of his long-ago work has been to foster a mad acceptance of the elimination of human beings in the name of making the world a better place. In older versions, such thinking was categorized as the psychological disorder of misanthropy or dismissed as the spiritual poison of nihilism. Now, it’s considered sane and sober government policy. Talk about irony, it’s even typically called humane. 

Here in Canada, we’re not merely pondering, but actively on the cusp of legislatively “extending,” medicalized self-execution for those too mentally unhealthy to encounter daily life. Human beings unable, through no fault of their own, to accomplish the basic routines that each day imposes will – indeed must, we’re told by advocates – be “empowered to choose” to have the State put them down like injured pets. 

Even without adopting such a policy of inclusiveness toward homicide for the mentally ill, Canadians are already approaching killing 100,000 of our fellow human beings through the purported public benevolence of so-called medical aid in dying.

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Likewise, since our collapse of legal limits on abortion in 1988, well over two million children have been denied life. Their killing has been courtesy of what earlier ages would consider a deranged argument that those who are never born will never suffer or cause suffering in others.

Again, it’s important to emphasize that Ehrlich was culpable only as one part of a much broader, deeply darker, movement to normalize such cultural psychosis and give it the patina of political acceptability. Biologically befuddled as he was, he by no means bears lone responsibility for the resulting wrongs.

In one sense, in fact, the wrongs he helped bequeath do make a right. By sheer contrast, they show how right Holy Mother Church has been in never wavering from the path of life. 

She has been not merely right but righteous by reminding us that we, human beings, are God’s creation made in His image to carry out just, wise and temperate dominion upon the earth.

She teaches us, too, to reject false prophets who enrich themselves with foolishness and lies. We, after all, can trust in the grace of The One who restores our fallen nature through His death and, ultimately, Resurrection.

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